This report is a guidebook with selected Q&A aims at finding out what kind of topics do philosophers from different school focus on.

The whole dataset :the dataset for the Philosophy Data Project contains over 300,000 sentences from over 50 texts spanning 10 major schools of philosophy. You can read more about the project on http://www.philosophydata.com/.

This report is prepared with the following environmental settings.

print(R.version)
##                _                           
## platform       x86_64-apple-darwin17.0     
## arch           x86_64                      
## os             darwin17.0                  
## system         x86_64, darwin17.0          
## status                                     
## major          4                           
## minor          1.1                         
## year           2021                        
## month          08                          
## day            10                          
## svn rev        80725                       
## language       R                           
## version.string R version 4.1.1 (2021-08-10)
## nickname       Kick Things

Question 1: Which schools are we going to explore?what does each school consist of?

For me,I am a totally beginner for philosophy and philosophors,especially considering the fact that I am an international student.Although I know about the famous philosophors like plato and aristotle,yet it is important to explore their philosophy from the perspective of schools.

#what are the schools in this dataset
ps.schools = unlist(unique(ps.data$school))
#what are the titles in this dataset
ps.titles =unlist(unique(ps.data$title))

ps.school.split = split(ps.data,ps.data$school)
ps.school.table = as.data.frame(table(ps.data$school))
colnames(ps.school.table)=c("school","count")
ps.school.table = ps.school.table[order(ps.school.table$count,decreasing =  TRUE),]
barplot(ps.school.table$count, las = 2, names.arg = ps.school.table$school,
        col ="lightblue", main ="Most frequent schools",
        ylab = "Sentence Count")

Question 2: How philosophors think about the world in general?

Firstly,we can see how philosophers think about the world by analyzing the frequency of certain words appearing in the sentences。

#Since the data has been lower-cased and tokenized,we can use the tokenized texts and remove all 
ps.corpus = Corpus(VectorSource(ps.data$tokenized_txt))
ps.corpus = tm_map(ps.corpus, removeNumbers)
ps.corpus = tm_map(ps.corpus, removePunctuation)
ps.corpus = tm_map(ps.corpus, removeWords, c("the", "and","also","two", "one","can","may","will","must","might","just","thus","therefore",stopwords("english")))
ps.corpus =  tm_map(ps.corpus, stripWhitespace)
ps.tdm.all<-TermDocumentMatrix(ps.corpus)
ps.tdm.tidy=tidy(ps.tdm.all)
ps.tdm.overall=summarise(group_by(ps.tdm.tidy, term), sum(count))
#word frequency 
ps.wordfreq <- data.frame(word =ps.tdm.overall$term ,freq=ps.tdm.overall$`sum(count)`)
ps.wordfreq <- ps.wordfreq[order(ps.wordfreq$freq,decreasing = TRUE),]
head(ps.wordfreq,20)
##            word  freq
## 79542    things 17482
## 47112       man 16152
## 80145      time 15307
## 26632      even 14461
## 29358     first 13880
## 53277       now 13041
## 69636       say 12856
## 87419       way 12854
## 51420    nature 12796
## 88698     world 12088
## 65068    reason 11464
## 88406   without 11432
## 79530     thing 11275
## 73614 something 10841
## 3537    another 10466
## 45095      like 10265
## 32924      good 10214
## 72488     since 10011
## 57335      part  9838
## 11089      case  9596
barplot(ps.wordfreq[1:20,]$freq, las = 2, names.arg = ps.wordfreq[1:20,]$word,
        col ="lightblue", main ="Most frequent words",
        ylab = "Word frequencies")

#wordcloud in general
wordcloud(ps.tdm.overall$term, ps.tdm.overall$`sum(count)`,
          scale=c(3,0.5),
          max.words=100,
          min.freq=100,
          random.order=FALSE,
          rot.per=0.3,
          use.r.layout=T,
          random.color=FALSE,
          colors=brewer.pal(8,"Dark2"))

We can see various philosophy topics in the high frequency words: “things”and “man”,“world”、“nature”、“object”、“subject”and so on; As we would like to identify interesting words for each sentence, we use [TF-IDF]to weigh each term within each sentence. It highlights terms that are more specific for a particular sentence.

# compute TF-IDF weighted document-term matrices for individual sentences
ps.dtm <- DocumentTermMatrix(ps.corpus,
                          control = list(weighting = weightTfIdf,stopwords = TRUE))
#ps.dtm=tidy(dtm)
ps.dtm = removeSparseTerms(ps.dtm , 0.99)
freq = data.frame(sort(colSums(as.matrix(ps.dtm)), decreasing=TRUE))
wordcloud(rownames(freq), freq[,1], max.words=100, colors=brewer.pal(5, "Dark2"))

For each sentence,the “nature”“existence”“object” outstands,we can see that philosophers focus a lot on conceptual and abstract topics,which make them think about the essence of world and man.

Question 3:How do philosophors from different school think about the world?What are the difference

For school analytic:

creat.wordcloud(ps.school.split[1],ps.data,names(ps.school.split[1]))

For school analytic:“theory”,“sense”,“truth”,“sense”,“fact” are the keywords

For school aristotle:

For school aristotle:“will”,“must”,“reason”,“nature”,“animal” are the keywords

For school capitalism:

For school capitalism: Price,money ,capital are the main topics

For school communism:

For school communism: labour,value, production,capital are the main topics

For school continental:

For school continental:“madness”,“form”,“relationship” appear the most

For school empiricism:

For school empiricism: “ideas/idea”,“reason” appear frequently

For school feminism:

For school feminism:without doubt,“women/woman”appear most,“man”,“love”,“children” appear frequently

For school german_idealism:

For school german_idealism:quite abstract and conceptual words like “consciousness”,“self” and “law”

For school nietzsche:

For school nietzsche:“life”“virtue”“god”“love”“soul”

For school phenomenology:

For school phenomenology:“knowledge”“experience”“conciousness”

For school plato:

For school plato:it is interesting “socrates” appears a lot of time

For school rationalism:

For school rationalism:Why “god” appear most here?Maybe it is always used as counterexamples

For school stoicism:

For school stoicism:you can guess this school is from old greek period from the words“thou”“thyself”“thee”

Conclusions

  1. Philosophy focus mainly on conceptual and abstract topics

  2. Different school of philosophers have their own topic